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Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#41

Post by Brajeshwar »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

Hey, Thanks for Lunar. There are other free alternatives but Lunar's Pro makes it easy for me to have the external monitor have some sane sync with my primary display.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#42

Post by synu »

specproc wrote: post #24

Non-profits are very different to corporate environments. Not without their own issues and bullshit, and less well-paid, but considerably more easy going and potentialy a lot more fun. Some people like the idea of doing something meaningful, I've been in the sector too long to care about that. What I do find is that the sort of problems you're facing are far more interesting. For example, I spend all day trying to fi…

I haven’t had much luck working with non-profits personally. It attracts people who build petty kingdoms, like any organisation, but there’s no mediating factor of needing to get results to temper it. It can all become quite arbitrary and toxic very quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#43

Post by Brajeshwar »

JaDogg wrote: post #35
joshxyz wrote: post #10

learn sales, it fixes everything.

What is a good way to get started?

I had suggested Founding Sales[1] a few times. It is an easy to read, and a good primer to start. You can read it online if you register. The print copy is worth it.

1. https://www.foundingsales.com

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#45

Post by xaml »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #16
joshxyz wrote: post #10

learn sales, it fixes everything.

Extremely authentic and good advice. However, in this case, the wrong target. The OP is looking to do technical work and perhaps, if viable, avoid the "selling" part. Everyone should "sell" and learn to be good at the specific idea of "selling" suited to that person. A CTO/VP-of-Eng should sell technical proofs, ideas, to the internal team and external hiring prospect, and sometime to the CEO to push forward technica…

"Learn to articulate yourself" might be a less sinister and more approachable phrase to many honest, hard-working engineering folks.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#46

Post by charlieyu1 »

rozenmd wrote: post #3

Consider teaching on your own blog - it's not immediate money, but if you're patient, you'll start to get folks asking if you're available for consulting, or if you've considered writing a book on what you write about. Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.

Writing books just don’t make enough money. It makes you look like cool for having published a book, and that’s about it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#47

Post by fredgrott »

hmm

Not good enough to teach?

You are thinking about this wrong!

Passion about something and communicating that to others is the invite for them to take that journey to mastery.

You just need the garyVee social media money tricks on top to make it fundable.

I am in the process of re-vamping that stuff to do exactly that and I am probably older than you at db of 1965...follow me to see it happen

https://fredgrott.medium.coom

Side note garyvee content stack for devs is the reels get expanded in to code and screenshot visual slides in the medium articles while at the same time making mp4 animation reels for instagram, linkedin, Fb posting. On top of that you break the programming into smaller foundation units that get the same expanded reels treatment. In my case I finalizing 8 months of sm postings in a few weekends at over 2,000 artifacts for 20k in social media postings. Yes! Really that much damn efficiency!

Come on take the damn plunge! the hard swim will do you some good to chase away all those wrong assumptions and mind fog!

BT FB, Linked, Instagram , Youtube all have 1 billion users to make this strategy work.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#48

Post by imdsm »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

Lunar looks like it's quite extensive. (And the website looks great!) How much work have you put into it, over what period, if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#49

Post by bjornsing »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

> Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.

What kind of paid web services did you try, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m thinking about going this route myself, but I hear you - I’ve also pretty much bought exclusively from the big guys.

Any other learnings from the web service route you could share? Like what tech stack / platform did you use? How did you try to market your service? Can you see other reason (than not being big / trustworthy enough) why it didn’t work?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#50

Post by lmarcos »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

Thanks for sharing! Have you considered selling your Apps outside the AppStore? Would it be worth it?
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